Can't silence your inner editor? Try this instead.

That’s awful. That idea’s no good. That’s not the right word. Delete! Delete!

Does this refrain sound familiar? It does to me. These thoughts pop up every time I sit down to write, and almost all the students I’ve worked with report something similar.

I call this voice the inner editor. It tends to be a harsh critic, not easily pleased, bit its feedback can be compelling. When the inner editor cries, “That’s dreadful! Change it right away,” we tend to listen. This is a perfectly understandable approach, but it creates a few issues:

• Writing takes forever. If we delete most of what we write, we could work for minutes, even hours, and only end up with a few sentences.

• It’s inefficient. Research shows that when we try to do two things at once, we don’t do either of them well. The same applies to the inner editor. It wants us to toggle back and forth between editing and writing, which compromises our ability to do both.

• It’s miserable. Inner editors can be ruthless, and the more power we give them, the worse we tend to feel about our writing.

If I had a penny for every time I gave a student this spiel, nobody would be worried about a coin shortage in America. You'd think after giving this advice repeatedly, I'd be able to follow it myself. For a while, I did–until I started my honors thesis, and my inner editor became an absolute tyrant.

The project itself was a blast. I got to interview autistic women about their experience of emotion, then analyze the data with a cool qualitative methodology and write up my findings. The first two steps were fun. The last nearly killed me.

For months, I wrote and rewrote every paragraph, every sentence, even. Nothing was good enough. I knew I should stop, but the instinct to delete overwhelmed me. I felt powerless against it.

I tried reasoning with the inner editor. It would say, That’s the worst thing you’ve ever written. And I’d respond, How is it possible that everything I write is the worst thing I’ve written? That seems hyperbolic.

Other times, it told me that my project was a failure. Again, I’d push back: I don’t know for sure that the project will fail. There’s only one way to find out.

This method helped me reframe some of my thoughts, but it drained my energy. I spent so much time arguing with the editor that I felt too exhausted to write.

That quarter, I also happened to be taking an emotion regulation seminar. During one class discussion, we started debating the merits of different therapies (a favorite topic among psych nerds everywhere). We were arguing about two modalities: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). Psychologists are big on acronyms.

To oversimplify somewhat, CBT changes your thoughts, while ACT changes the way you relate to your thoughts. If someone struggled with social anxiety, a CBT practitioner might have them record specific thoughts: Everyone hates me, I can’t do this, the party will be awful, etc. Then they’d identify distortions and come up with more rational beliefs. For instance, “the party will be awful” could become “the party might be terrible, but it might be fun, and I won’t know unless I go.”

In contrast, an ACT practitioner might say, “These thoughts are the chatter that your brain generates when you’re stressed. Just because you think something doesn’t mean it’s true. Instead of arguing with those thoughts, you can acknowledge they’re there without letting them call the shots for you.”

I realized during this discussion that I’d been taking a CBT approach to the inner editor. What if I tried ACT?

That afternoon in the library, I opened the blasted Google Doc and started writing. Immediately, my inner editor sprang into action. That’s not the right word at all! Change it, now!

This time, instead of arguing, I said to myself, Here we go again! Those are the same thoughts that always pop up. Listening to them is usually not a great plan, so I’m not going to delete that word, even though it’s tempting.

My thoughts were like crows, I decided. They make a lot of noise, but I won't let them stop me from doing what I need to do.

Photo by Qurratul Ayin Sadia on Unsplash

Later that week, I got some live coaching at the tutoring center. My tutor sat across from me as I wrote, keeping an eye on the Google doc. Whenever I started deleting something, she’d cry, “Stop self-sabotaging!” That helped, too.

The week after that, I returned to a previous draft and had another realization. The paragraph that my inner editor deemed horrendously unacceptable was actually not that bad. Maybe even, dare I say, good.

Sometimes, my inner editor was right. I’d reopen an old draft and think, Yeah, this is terrible. But as I often tell my students, you can’t edit a blank page. The beauty of a bad draft is that you can always make it better.

This story has a happy ending. I finished my honors thesis as painlessly as one might reasonably expect, and my inner editor became less of a despot.  I still feel the temptation to tinker all the time—guess how badly I wanted to redo this sentence?—but I control it instead of it controlling me.

If this new perspective on making peace with the inner editor sounds like something you might want to try, here are a few ACT exercises to get you started.

1. Treat your thoughts like you treat pop-up ads. Do you click on every ad you see? Probably not, right? You probably don’t treat them like literal truths, either. Next time you hear your inner editor think of it like a pop up ad. You can’t get rid of the thoughts, but you can choose not to click on them.

2. De-fuse your thoughts. Spend a writing session making a list of the judgments that your inner editor provides. After choose the most bothersome of item on your list and repeat the words in your head or aloud until they start to sound like nonsense. This might sound weird, but it's a standard ACT technique that I found really useful.

3. Thank your thoughts. Your inner editor isn't all bad. It stems from a desire to write well. If you didn't have a sense of how to improve your writing when you reread it it would be really tough to revise. When you hear your inner editor start to speak up, you can say something like, “Thanks for the input. We'll definitely come back to that in the revision phase.” My inner editor often seems placated by this. Yours might be, too.